Help Google Play Music showing wrong artist background image

[josh3ber]

With the recent update to Google Play Music, the interface shows each artist with a background image of some sort. For a lot of the music I have in my library the CD cover art is correct, but the background image is wrong, showing something completely unrelated. Anyone know why or how to correct it? None of my music has been purchased from Google Play, which might be part of the problem.

Thanks.

 

[josh3ber]

Am I the only one experiencing this?

 

[Tim K]

I'm not sure what you are referring to...

Do you mean when you are in "my library" and looking at the list of artists? In that case, the background image is apparently some sort of headshot or PR image of the artist. In the case that Google doesn't have that PR image, they use a blurred image of one of the album covers for that particular artist.

Or are you saying that you have the wrong cover art showing up for specific albums? If its cover art, I think you can go into google music via the browser, select the album, mouse over the album, click on the 3 menu dots and choose edit album info.... then you can select to change the cover art.

 

[josh3ber]

Hi Tim. The cover art is correct. The background image for a lot of my music is completely wrong, not just a blurred background. The worst example is I have a few CD's by an Italian metal band called Sentence. When I go to play their music in my library, the background image shows characters from the movie Twilight. I do not want to see that image when I'm on my phone or anywhere for that matter.

 

[Tim K]

I've found a few anomalies in my music as well. It seems to occur on a couple of tracks where I have the song name with a (featuring xxxxxxx) at the end - but not all. For example, I have a track by Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa - Young Wild & Free (Feat. Bruno Mars)....... and the artist photo is Bruno Mars. Another one is a Roberta Flack song Featuring Peabo Bryson, and the artist photo is Peabo Bryson. Then I have a couple of songs by P. Diddy.... and the artist photo in the list of artists is of Faith Evans.....even though she doesn't appear in any of the included songs or track info. And if I click on P Diddy's name, it brings up his photo. So I don't understand that one at all.

I'm going to try to report the bugs to google.

 

[eagleec]

With the recent update to Google Play Music, the interface shows each artist with a background image of some sort. For a lot of the music I have in my library the CD cover art is correct, but the background image is wrong, showing something completely unrelated. Anyone know why or how to correct it? None of my music has been purchased from Google Play, which might be part of the problem.

Thanks.

I have written a novel to Google about this. It took probably 6 emails before they understood what I was talking about. Now, they are aware of the issue but I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. This is because of 3 overarching issues:

1. The Google front-line tech support that is relied on to communicate these issues up the chain is pretty much the equivalent of Tier-1 AOL tech support. I don't want to bash them personally but let's just say they are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

2. It will require a fundamentally different approach to Artist art which has to be debated and decided on. They can either:
- switch their lookup service from Google Play Store to another agent lookup service like Last.fm (still not perfect, but better than what they've got), or,
- Allow users to upload their own Artist background images

3. The bulk of users probably only have mainstream artists that match correctly. Therefore they are not hearing about this flawed system as frequently as they should.


So, what this means is: too few people will complain about the issue, the issue will be misunderstood and fumbled around with by Google tech support, and then it will be bounced around until someone finally just decides to allow people to override the auto-artist art with their own art.

I listen to a ton of underground and independent artists, and my artist background art is probably only 40% correct in the current iteration of Play Music - and in some cases even the correct art is a terrible shot and I want to change it. This has nothing to do with metadata, I'm pretty obsessive about my metadata. That's the hardest thing to convey to Google tech support - they will send you to the metadata editing page 5 times before the message gets through: the metadata is FINE, it's the artist agent lookup service that is dorked up.


I am probably the only person that thinks the new Google Play Music interface (at least on my tablet) sucks. It is Google's "Apple Maps" in my opinion. I don't think there's anything to do about that, they'll do what they'll do. But on my tablet I've rolled back to stock Play Music, and forbade the application to auto-update. This at least fixes the mismatched artist background images. You could do the same on your phone, probably.

 

[Tim K]

I have written a novel to Google about this. It took probably 6 emails before they understood what I was talking about. Now, they are aware of the issue but I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. This is because of 3 overarching issues:
.

I too reached out to Google.... and I too had to send at least 6 emails before someone actually bothered to read what I wrote instead of assuming I was talking about album art. I even attached multiple screenshots. Finally someone got it.

I'm not sure what the cause is, but from my conversations with them, it is not a matter of a lookup service. It is also, not a matter of them having the wrong artist image. According to google, the labels actually provide them with the artist images, and its not that their images are wrong, its that somewhere in google's coding, it is pulling in the wrong one from their database. Also, it is not limited to smaller or indy artists. I have seen problems with P Diddy artwork... and he's about as mainstream as it gets.

What I found is a few things that confirm this. If you go into the "music store" and search for an artist and go to that artist's "page", the images are all correct (at least for me). This means that the label has provided the correct image. However, I have seen the following two scenarios...

1. An 'incorrect artist' on your phone's app under my library, may be 'correct' in the desktop browser, and correct in the store. This tells me its coded wrong for the phone app.

2. An 'incorrect artist' on your phone's app under my library, may also be 'incorrect' in the desktop browser, but correct in the store. Obviously, that means it is coded wrong in both phone app and browser app.

Also, if artist imagery is not available, or is coded wrong and the app isn't pointing to imagery, the app defaults to an album cover with a blurred background of that album cover. Again, I've seen artists who have imagery in the store...show up in the app as an album cover. Obviously, these aren't coded right either.

One thing I've definitely noticed with ALOT of my incorrect artist imagery, is that they tend to be cases where there is just one song from one album, and the track title contains a "featuring another artist".

Anyway.... I've sent all this stuff to google with screenshots from the app, the browser and the store.... and they finally seemed to see what I was talking about. We'll see how it goes.

 

[eagleec]

Tim,

I have not found this to be the case. Every artist image that shows up in my player (both on my Nexus and in the web player) is the one that is used in Play Store, and the Play Store artist image is likewise incorrect. Here are a few bands you can search on to show what I'm talking about. All of them have incorrect Play Store images, and they are the same images that are being called into my player/web interface. I think this IS a lookup service between at least the player clients and Google, but I don't know how Google is getting these images. I suspect it is in some way based off their web image search algorithm. Either way check these artists:

Carbon Based Lifeforms
Elysion
Jamie Barnes

There are a lot more in my collection like this, and there are also huge issues with classical composers. Whereas Last.fm will maintain art for Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, etc etc, Google Play does not, and you may just get some random album cover that may or may not match. I have a lot of Brahms in my collection and there is artist art of some old guy; I don't know who it is, but it is definitely not Brahms.

There is also the issue of artists that share the same name. I have a band called "Iris" that this happens to. And collectives - I own a bunch of Cirque du Soleil material that Play can't figure out how to attribute with art.


All in all, the more I use it, the more I think this new player really sucks, compared to other offerings. I like Grooveshark, but I'm sketchy about uploading all my stuff to it since I think it's only a lawsuit away from shutting down. I like the idea of Spotify and iTunes Match, but I would like to have a web-based player where I can stream music at work (where I can't install software). Any ideas of what might be a good alternative service?

 

[Tim K]

Tim,

I have not found this to be the case. Every artist image that shows up in my player (both on my Nexus and in the web player) is the one that is used in Play Store, and the Play Store artist image is likewise incorrect.

I think, at least according to what I was told, that this is a different problem. If the artist page image is wrong in the play store, that is an issue with them having the wrong artwork. What google told me to do in that case, is to go to the artist page in the play store, and on the bottom left side click on "Flag as inappropriate" and then fill out the form under "incorrect images, labeling or other content issues".

In my case, the artist pages are correct, but the player is pulling the wrong images.

Here are some examples